by Sam Pivnik
On the quay at Lübeck, where I’d squatted all those years before waiting to board the Cap Arcona, the wind blew with a vengeance, playing havoc with the sound boom and shaking the camera. I couldn’t help shivering and hoped the youngsters with us would assume it was the cold. I’ve told and retold the story of the Cap Arcona many times, but there, in the place where it had happened, it felt different. Sleet began to drive into our faces but all I saw was the grey sea mist and the burning, roaring hull. All I heard were the screams of dying men and the snarl of aircraft. I was glad to get away. Moritz had been one of the luckier ones; as a Western Jew he was accepted onto the Red Cross buses and for him the war was over.
On the third and final day of filming I stood again outside that farm in Neuglasau, the home of Max Schmidt where such bizarre events had happened. In front of an outbuilding which I don’t think was there in 1945 was a huge rectangular stone with a name carved on it – ‘Max Schmidt’. What sort of man has his name carved in four-inch-high letters outside his home? It reminded me of that other, far better known, symbol of the Third Reich, the dreadful, mocking words over the gate at Auschwitz I – Arbeit Macht Frei; Works Sets You Free.
I had been waiting for this moment for forty-four years, the time I would come face to face with a mass murderer. Would he, in a spirit of a new-found contrition and guilt, fall at my feet, as I once had fallen at Dr Mengele’s, and beg forgiveness? Or would he put a bullet in my head for old time’s sake? In the event he took the coward’s way out and sent out his daughter-in-law, complete with dog. ‘Herr Schmidt,’ she told us, ‘is not at home.’ Did I see the curtains twitch in an upstairs window or was it just a trick of the light? She went back inside and the cameras rolled as I told the story of the death march and the role played in it by Oberscharführer Schmidt.
While filming we met a woman whose family had sheltered on this farm back in 1945 as they fled west from the Russians. I remembered her older sister and I asked her about the kind Miller family who had fed us those delicious schmaltzy potatoes and whose daughter Mendeler the shoemaker had married. Yes, she knew the Millers, but they had moved away long ago. Mendeler and his wife had emigrated to the United States.
Then we came face to face with the old Germany, the Germany of the Reich. A Germany that Germans like to pretend doesn’t exist any more. The owner of a petrol station nearby told us he was a Volksdeutscher Pole. He was a boy of ten at the end of the war and, he assured us, there were no prisoners here then, nobody in a striped uniform. ‘Why do you people,’ he wanted to know, ‘have to keep on returning to the same thing?’
I told him I was a Jew.
‘Ah, you Jews,’ he grunted as though I’d pushed a magic button, ‘always in trouble, always making trouble … I’ll tell you they always make trouble, they killed Christ…’
I was exhausted after those three days and barely remember the journey back home. I suppose I had done all I could in the context of Max Schmidt. Barry Davis was kind enough to say I’d come through once more and perhaps I had. But all I could remember were the graves of six concentration camp prisoners in Ahrensbök and the inscription carved there – ‘Den Lebenden zur Mahnung’; a reminder for future generations.
I wonder.
* * *
There was a curious postscript to all this. Towards the end of the 1990s I was contacted by Pastor Schwab, the Lutheran priest in charge of the Evangelical Church in Ahrensbök. Schwab had met Gerhard Hoch and he had given the pastor my address. One of his congregation was Max Schmidt and the pastor suggested that he and I might meet. Was this a move from Schmidt himself, an attempt at atonement? Or was the pastor, no doubt for all the best reasons, keen to get Schmidt to face his past? I told Schwab I would indeed meet the man on the condition that he write me a letter of apology first. He wrote this to me, in German:
Dear Herr Pivnik,
I learned from Herr Schwab that you wish to have contact with me. I am quite ready to answer anything for you that I can, so ask me. I greet you and remain friendly,
Max Schmidt
Like all historical documents, it raises more questions than it answers. The implication is that I had asked to see him, which wasn’t actually true. I was certainly curious to know how he would answer the questions I could put to him: who tipped you off about the planned escape of the Russian officer from Fürstengrube? Why did you shoot Chaskele in the same camp? How can you possibly justify the hanging of Maurice, Leon and the others while you were Kommandant? And will you admit, which you did not in the court at Kiel, that you were directly responsible for everything that happened on the death march? As for the last line, I couldn’t believe the gross hypocrisy of it. How generous of him to greet me and to remain friendly, rather as he had that day at the farm when he turned up with a shaved head and the stolen papers of a man he had shot. I call this my letter of apology but of course it is really nothing of the sort.
That letter was followed by another one from Pastor Schwab telling me that Schmidt had withdrawn his offer to meet on the advice of his lawyers and demanded that I return the letter. That I refused to do – it was addressed to me and that made it mine. And Oberscharführer Schmidt had taken enough from me in the brief months during which our lives were linked.
Max Hans Peter Schmidt died on holiday in Spain in 2001. Towards the end of his life he still held parties at the farm for his cronies of the old school and after enough schnapps they would remember and sing the old songs:
The trumpet blows its shrill and final blast!
Prepared for war and battle have we stood.
Soon Hitler’s banners will move unchecked at last
The end of German slavery in our land!
I hope he’ll forgive me if I don’t join in.
15
Return to Eden
Nathan went back first. We were interviewed separately by University College London in the 1990s as people suddenly realised that Holocaust survivors were a vanishing breed. For years I had been making a living in the art business, buying, restoring and selling paintings. For a while I had my own gallery just off the Portobello Road, the Mecca of antique hunters in West London. Nathan married Jill in 1975 and around the house we shared – they were on the ground floor, I lived above – I built a garden wall with the old skills I’d learned in Fürstengrube. After the experience of so many survivors who had gone back in search of their past, I wasn’t keen. Janek the Kapo, who had given me a hiding at the Schmidt farm, was murdered by local Poles when he tried to get his house back.
But Nathan went back. He did it with students from various West Midland universities in 1996. The trip was led by Stephen Smith, the founder and director of the Beth Shalom Centre in Laxton, Nottingham. The Centre is the only one in Britain dedicated to the Holocaust and beneath a pillar in its peaceful gardens lies a plot of earth taken from the six death camps of the Nazi regime – a little reminder of Auschwitz on the edge of Sherwood Forest. The party got to Bedzin early one morning and within minutes of getting off the coach they were surrounded by Poles, all men, mostly young and mostly drunk. One of them exposed himself even though there were several women in the party. Another prodded Nathan in the chest and the mood got ugly. They demanded to know why ‘you lot’ had come back. There was no chance, they told him, he’d get his property back. ‘Why don’t you go back to Auschwitz where you belong?’
Bedzin in 1996 was still what it had become fifty-three years earlier when they liquidated the Kamionka; it was Judenrein, cleansed of Jews. There were two Jewish memorials and I think Nathan was pleased to see that neither of these, at least, had been desecrated. One marked the site of the Bedzin orphanage and records that 250 children from there had been deported to the gas chambers. The other was a concrete block with menorah on each side, marking the site of the Great Synagogue I had seen blazing when I was a boy of thirteen. Nathan felt touched when the young students in the party began to place stones on the cube, a mark of respect for Polish Jews by Gentiles from far away.
The party was a bit alarmed when Nathan said he wanted to visit the Rapaport school. After the welcoming committee in the coach park, they didn’t quite know what to expect. He recognised the basic layout of the red-brick building where he and I had taken off our shoes to protect the polished floors years before. He dashed inside, leaving the rest of them standing in the bitter Bedzin cold for twenty minutes. Then he dashed out again, grinning from ear to ear.
‘Come in!’ he said. ‘The children want to meet you.’
They were ushered into a classroom – the Rapaport school is still a school for primary children – and everyone stood up as they entered. They sang a Polish song for the visitors and talked about their history project on the Jewish heritage of the town. They were delighted to have a ‘real’ Jew to talk to because none of them had ever met one. It was an uplifting experience in the end, but Nathan could not help thinking how soon these sweet little children would turn into the anti-Semitic yobs outside.
I have now been back twice. Why? I can’t honestly say. It was a mixture of things really. Just as I had to know what happened to my family, so I had to see what had become of my home. Our group was led by a rabbi and we visited places I didn’t know because they have become iconic in the history of Polish Jews – Warsaw, where the inmates of the ghetto rose up and fought a bitter, hopeless war of attrition against the SS; Kraków, where Oscar Schindler saved more than 1,100 Jews from the gas chambers. We went to Wodzislaw, the first time I had set foot in the Garden of Eden for sixty-six years. There are no Jews there now, not since the SS, like the Angel Jophiel, drove them out into the wilderness. The homes of my relatives, my aunt’s mill, my shoemaker uncle’s workshop have been gentrified and upgraded and are lived in by Gentile Poles.
I took a photograph of the old synagogue on a still snowy street that spring. The glass of its windows had gone and the roof had fallen in. The windows stared like sad, dark eyes and the plaster was cracked and peeling. The ground floor rooms had been used as a rubbish dump. That said it all. I had only ever seen Wodzislaw in high summer when everything was golden beneath a sky of unclouded blue. I shouldn’t have gone back.
I shouldn’t have gone back to Bedzin either, although I didn’t experience the highs or the lows of Nathan’s visit. Kazimerz’s castle was still there, still a ruin more or less unchanged, except the price of admission had gone up! I wandered the streets with my party and I was surprised that I was remembering names I thought I’d forgotten. Many of the houses were still there, even if they were no longer Jewish. I could almost see my friends and neighbours smiling out of their windows, waving to me from their doors. The furniture factory at Feder’s, next door to Welner’s, the ironmongers, and the Wechselmans next door to that. The Jakubowics were oil merchants and then came the house of the Shanebergs and the Klingers. I remember that Lejbus Klinger was a passionate Zionist and he had four daughters and a son, an engineer. No doubt they all died in the camps.
I walked under the archway that led to our courtyard and stood again on the flat cobbles where I used to kick a ball around. Number 77 is Number 81 now, but it hadn’t changed that much. I could almost see Nathan’s bike leaning up against the wall and little Chana skipping with her friends. As I walked in, I felt numb. It was a feeling of such utter loss I can’t describe it. Part of me saw my mother in the kitchen, making the Shabbat meal with Hendla and Ruchla-Lea. I may have smiled when I thought to myself: Father won’t be home. He’ll still be at the stiebel or locked in earnest conversation with the rabbi.
I had to shake myself clear of all that. There was no rabbi in Bedzin now, no stiebel, no synagogue. Someone took a photograph of me standing outside my home. The shadows of late afternoon are falling across the courtyard and you can’t see the tears running down my cheeks. I fell ill on one of my visits and ended up in hospital, a newer version of the one Jews weren’t allowed to use during the German occupation. I was delirious with pneumonia, part of the old chest weakness I’d had all my life. I remember saying to someone in our party, ‘Get me home. I don’t want to die here.’ It would have been supremely romantic, I suppose: Szlamek Pivnik – the joiner, the builder, the tailor, the art dealer, the survivor – had gone home to die. But Bedzin wasn’t my home any more. It was a place I’d dreamed about for so long. But it was empty now, with no heart, and the dream turned out, after all, to be a nightmare.
There was one uplifting moment about my return to Modzejowska Street. I heard them before I saw them, but in the narrow garret loft at the top of the houses in the courtyard I heard and then saw little grey birds, strutting, fluttering and cooing in their cages. Mr Rojecki’s pigeons – or at least their descendants – were still there and had come home to roost.
Then we went back to Auschwitz. Auschwitz-Birkenau today is the most infamous of the Nazi death camps because it has been preserved for all time as a monument of man’s inhumanity to man. The fences are no longer electrified and well-kept lawns have replaced the irregular surface of the Quarantine Block that I helped make back in those hopeless, desperate, terrible days. The place was full of visitors, mostly young, all of them fascinated. Some of them were schoolchildren from all over the world, carrying out history projects because the Nazis, I know, are big business in school curricula today. I visited parts of the camp I’d never been to before, with the glass cases of the belongings of the dead – the hair, the shoes, the prayer-shawls. I found the block I’d lived in when I worked on the Rampe and could even remember where my bunk had once stood.
But I didn’t stay under a roof for long. The old terrible fear came back and I had to get out into the air. I stood again back on the Rampe where striped madmen swarmed around me in my imagination, whispering, ‘Tell them you’re eighteen. Tell them you’re eighteen.’ I looked around and where Israeli children were carrying the blue Star of David on their flags and singing their Israeli songs I could still see those other Jews, the Jews of my childhood, stumbling off the cattle-trucks, blinking in the sunshine or the snow. I could hear again the barking dogs, the snarl of the SS commands. And as I looked along the Rampe I saw an SS Hauptscharführer in shining boots and carrying doeskin gloves. He looked at me, smiled his gappy smile.
And he flicked his gloves to the right.
My father’s brother – Uncle Moyshe, the tailor from Szopoenice. He never knew his influence saved my life.
My father with his mother, Ruchla-lea.
Bedzin, the town of my birth, showing the Great Synagogue (centre) and the old Kazimerz Castle, which still stands.
My beautiful sister Chana, who went straight to the gas at Birkenau 6 August 1943.
The Gordonia Youth Group in 1938, which grew into a Resistance organisation. My older sister Hendla is sitting in the second row, second from the left.
Alfred Rossner’s tailoring shop. My father and Hendla worked for Rossner after the Germans came in 1942.
My grandmother, Ruchla-lea, as she looked the last time I saw her when day turned to night at the Hakoah Stadium.
Jews arriving in Bedzin in 1941 from Oswiecim, where the Nazis were building Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Jews moving out of their homes in Bedzin to the Kamionka ghetto.
Jews arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They had been in the cattle trucks for days.
The ‘lookalike’ of the Rampe Kommando. The boy on the far left has often been cited as me, but I had left Birkenau by the time this picture was taken.
Selection at Birkenau. The women, children and elderly selected for death are on the left and the healthy, selected for work and perhaps survival, on the right.
‘Life unworthy of life’. Women, children and old people walking to their deaths in the gas chambers. They had no idea.
Block IIa – the quarantine section of Birkenau, my home for ten days.
The primitive toilet facilities in the quarantine block. Here, Yitzak shat his diamonds.
Bed in Birkenau – five to a bunk and a rough straw mattress.
Death in Birken
au – quick and effective. The artist Mieczysław Kośscielniak depicts something I saw many times.
In the company of Cain – the SS of Birkenau enjoying a little R&R. Front row, left to right: Karl Höcker, Otto Moll, Rudolf Höss, Richard Baer, Josef Kramer, Franz Hössler and Josef Mengele.
Me, shortly after liberation in Neustadt May 1945. There are no surviving photos of me before this.
The Cap Arcona in her prime as a luxury cruise ship.
The Cap Arcona as she looked when she was bombed by the RAF, 3 May 1945.
Me (left) with my brother Nathan shortly after liberation. Taken at Konstanz am Bodensee where we were helping with illegal transports of Jewish refugees to Palestine.
Aunt Rachael and Uncle Solomon Abramovitch, my relatives in London with whom we stayed when we first came to the UK.
Nathan and me in Trafalgar Square in the 1950s. We had recently become naturalised citizens.
Going to the war – Nathan took this photo of me just before I left London for Israel.
